Much more than jobs being outsourced.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: Up front: news, trends & analysis

Along with American jobs exported overseas, individuals' personal data is often sent to countries that lack consumer privacy laws.

A growing number of U.S. medical and financial-services farms are shifting information-processing work to lower-wage countries that lack tough privacy laws, leaving their consumers vulnerable to identity theft and possibly other crimes.

According to Gartner, offshore business process outsourcing services, which typically require the transfer of personal data, grew 38 percent last year to just under $2 billion.

Concerns include overseas call-center workers being able to view or manipulate personal records stored in U.S. data centers and having databases of information on their citizens physically located in a foreign country and operated by a third party.

"Outside the U.S., medical privacy doesn't really mean anything" said California Sen. Liz Figueroa, who wants to bar offshore outsourcing of medical and financial records. She is sponsoring bills to require California employers to notify the state and employees if they plan to move 20 or more jobs overseas and to prohibit state contracts from being fulfilled offshore.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has asked the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency to investigate whether banks that process customers'...